Moodle plugins directory: Treasure Hunt

Outdoor, indoor and virtual-map treasure-chases with geolocation and QR codes. This module for Moodle allows to organize outdoor-serious-games with your students. TreasureHunt implements a browser-based play application (no need to install any native app) and a geographical editor for encoding the stages of the game. The game can be configured with a range of options that make the module to be very flexible and useful in many situations: individual/team, moving/desktop-marking, scoring from time, position, completion, etc.
Languages: English, Spanish, Greek, more to come...

Treasurehunt

Outdoor treasure-chases with geolocation.

This module for Moodle allows to organize outdoor-serious-games with your students. TreasureHunt implements a browser-based play application (no need to install any native app) and a geographical editor for encoding the stages of the game. The game can be configured with a range of options that makes the module to be very flexible and useful in many situations: individual/team, moving/desktop-marking, scoring from time, position, completion, etc.

Installation

Install from the plugins menu or manually unzip, and copy into Moodle's /mod folder

visit administration page to install module

configure default settings for your site

use in any course as wished

Operation

create an instance of the activity

create one or more roads to be followed by your "hunters"

create a set of stages in each road.

draw the location of the stages with the built-in GIS editor. Optionally enter or generate a QR code to be scanned to discover that location.

write smart and educational clues that point to the next stage. Optionally, write a multiple-choice question to double-check the discovery of the stage

select the modality of the treasure hunt: individual or grouped (you will need to create the groups and groupings of students).

adjust the grading method and penalisations.

let your students play the game.

Grading of the module

The module will produce a grade for every student (or team) running the hunt. The proposed schema is the following:

Choose from:

Grade from time (absolute or relative): the winner of the hunt marks the best time. The grade is calculated by interpolating the finishing time being 50 the end time of the hunt and 100 the best finishing time. The players that did not finish the hunt receive a grade under 50 calculated just by the number of riddles solved.

Grade from riddles: each player (or team) scores proportionally by number of riddles solved, being 100 when a road is completely solved, and 0 when no riddle is solved.

Grade from position: The score is calculated by interpolating the position in the ranking, being 100 the score for the first player and 50 for the last player. The players that did not finish the hunt receive a grade under 50 calculated just by the number of riddles solved.

For all these schemas optionally it can penalize by location failures and wrong answers.

Penalization is expressed in % of the grade. Per example, if penalization is 5, a player with 3 failures will penalize his grade by 15%, that is, will receive 85% of the grade calculated by the rest of the criteria.

Releases summary

Release v1.2.0 includes custom maps (among other fixes).

Now the map can be customized in several ways:

Custom overlays from uploaded images or WMS layers.

Custom base maps from uploaded images or WMS layers.

Override default base maps with uploaded imgaes or WMS layers.

Disable geographical tools to use images not related to the terrain.

Release v1.1.0 includes support for QR codes. It is very useful indoor (i.e. museums).

Release v1.0.0 first production-ready release.

Note on QR Codes support

The stages can be solved by location or by scanning a QRCode. It is useful indoor or where the GPS gives a bad precission.

The module includes a webRTC-based code scanner that works at least in Chrome and Firefox browsers on Android. IPhone users with IOS prior to version 11 (released in autumn 2017) can't use the scanner yet, and some specific android phones are known to have problems with scanning codes from the browser.

The module includes a pre-test procedure if the game includes QRcodes.

You can use existent QR labels or generate your own directly from the edit-stage page.

Enjoy.

Potential privacy issues

Upon teachers' activation the module can record the geo-location of the students during a game as a sequence of points.